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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
Latest News
From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons
David Garcia
If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.
But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.
Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.
For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”
In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.
Takeo Nishitani, Kenji Tobita, Kunihiko Okano, Masayushi Sugimoto, Toshihiko Yamanishi, Roland Heidinger, Angel Ibarra, Noriyoshi Nakajima
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 1-8
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-733
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the Broader Approach (BA) activities, cooperated work on the DEMO design is undertaken with the IFERC project team and home teams in the EU and Japan. System code benchmarking to establish the common design tools and the definition of critical design issues have been progressed so far. The BA DEMO design work is focusing on the common critical issues such as divertor design, remote maintenance scheme, and blanket design. In parallel, safety research for the fusion power plant started re-analyses, which include severe events such as total loss of coolant without any electric power. In the DEMO R&D activities, five R&D tasks related to blanket materials and technology are carried out intensively according to the common interests of the EU and Japan for DEMO. A neutron source using the IFMIF/EVEDA prototype accelerator and the IFMIF/EVEDA lithium target test loop is under discussion as one of the major activities after 2017.
